Gods & Monsters

by Lyn Benedict

  The phone rang again, and she snatched it up, hoping it was Suarez continuing his habit of calling the office first. He was one of the long line of people who’d rather talk to Alex than Sylvie.

  “Ms. Lightner?”

  Sylvie cursed herself for not checking the ID. Salvador Ruben. The last person she needed to talk to just then. “Mr. Ruben—”

  “Have you heard from your friend yet? Did she find anything? Did she find Maria?” Sylvie imagined that Ruben would have a nice voice when it wasn’t pitched high with stress and hope. Now it quivered with so much tension, she felt her back and neck lock up in sympathy.

  She let out a careful, soundless breath, stared out at the soothing flow of South Beach traffic, the glow of headlights and taillights, the glitter against the dark. She could lie, tell him she hadn’t found anything, let the cops break the news; but he was her client. She had a responsibility to tell him the truth. Or at least as much of it as she could without jeopardizing the police investigation. “Mr. Ruben. It’s not good—”

  “Oh god,” he said, reading her tone accurately. “Is she dead? Did someone do something to her?”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said. “I expect you’ll be contacted by the police soon.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked. “You saw her? It was her? The picture I gave you wasn’t very good. Maybe it’s someone else. . . .” A last hope thinned his voice, turned it to a whispered prayer, a man asking for a miracle.

  Sylvie had dealt with gods; she knew miracles didn’t come cheap.

  “The police will answer your questions,” she said.

  “But you’ll keep looking? For whoever did this thing?”

  Sylvie hesitated. She shouldn’t. It was a police matter now, not hers. But something about the scene nagged at her, left her with the same jittery discomfort in her bones that came from being around inimical magic. “I will.”

  It took her another few minutes to verify that he wasn’t alone, that he had a friend who could wait with him for the news. For the inevitable call that would shatter his world. A few minutes of evasion, not telling him exactly what had happened to his wife.

  They felt like the longest few minutes of her life.

  She set the receiver down, crossed to the couch, and slumped onto it with a creak of stressed leather. The air vent above cooled her skin, her agitated nerves. She wasn’t good at patience. She wasn’t good at offering comfort. She wished that Alex or Demalion had been around to take that call. But Alex was done for the day, and Demalion was . . . finding himself in Chicago, trying to see what he could salvage of his old life in the new skin he wore.

  Sylvie kicked at the armrest, a brief spurt of frustration, then dug out her cell phone.

  Suarez wasn’t getting off the hook so easily; if he wouldn’t call her, she’d call him. She couldn’t make him pick up, though. It went straight to voice mail.

  “Call me, Lio,” she said. “I’ve got a client who’s waiting on official word about his wife.”

  The ceiling above her striped light, dark, light with passing cars; the plate-glass window beside her grew cooler as the day’s heat faded. Sylvie flipped the phone, checked the time again. Almost ten thirty. She’d spent most of the day on the road, meeting Tatya, then taking an ATV down bumpy trails and hiking through saw-grass paths, then doing it all in reverse; she’d have to find out when Alex left. It might give her a vague idea of when the illusion trap had been laid. If it was after working hours, the odds of a witness dropped.

  There was a sweet spot Sylvie herself had taken advantage of when breaking into businesses. That gap of time between people heading home and heading out to dinner. If she were the witch, she’d have laid her trap then.

  Of course, if Sylvie were the witch, she’d have sent goons in to take Sylvie out while she struggled with the illusion. Sylvie believed in being thorough.

  She forced herself off the couch and folded the phone away, fighting the urge to redial Suarez. The kitchenette light flickered, bringing to mind that there were leftover enchiladas in the little fridge, just the thing for a bite before she went home to her apartment and its perennially-in-need-of-groceries kitchen.

  While she nuked the enchiladas, munching absently on the cold corn chips stored in the fridge to avoid attracting palmetto bugs, she clicked on the local news. The microwave dinged, but she didn’t notice.

  Breaking news and local news, and it was full of streaming lights, red and blue, and searchlights shining down on flames against a grey-green backdrop.

  Everglades, she thought. Guess Suarez hadn’t called because he was too busy dodging the media.

  There hadn’t been flames when she left.

  The news bar across the bottom of the screen made her heart jolt: Three policemen killed in Everglades.

  She hit the volume, listened to the newscast, trying to filter the controlled hysterics of the news anchor for actual fact—everything was urgent these days; everything was imminent doom on Channel 7. As far as she could tell, it was her crime scene, but what had changed? When she and Tatya had been there, it was as quiet as death; there hadn’t even been mosquito hum in the air. Now the newscasters mentioned bombs and ambushes in a single breath, followed it with a totally inane recap of how many helicopters were circling the scene, and a self-referential media report.

  Sylvie muted the set, hit redial on her cell phone. “Lio. Give me a call if you’re all right—” Stupid message, but she felt the need to try something more than just waiting to see if the news anchors would broadcast the names of the dead.

  Her office phone rang again, and Sylvie grabbed it, chanting Be Lio, be Lio in her head.

  “Shadows Inquiries,” she said.

  There was silence on the line, a silence of words, not breath. She heard a rasp of controlled air, a clogged sound that might be a stifled sob, and her hand tightened on the receiver. “It’s Sylvie. Who is this?”

  “. . . Lio wants you,” the woman said, just when Sylvie was about to reluctantly let the line go dead again. “You come. You see him. Then you get away from my family.”

  “Lourdes,” Sylvie said. Adelio Suarez’s wife. She skipped the questions rising to her lips—Was Lio all right? Was he hurt? What happened?—and homed in on the information she needed right at this moment. “Where are you?”

  “Jackson Memorial,” Lourdes spat, and slammed the phone down.

  SYLVIE LOOKED IN ON ADELIO AND WINCED EVEN AS RELIEF STARTED trickling into her system. He wasn’t in critical care, didn’t have anything her TV-trained eyes would assess as indicators of serious injury—no cannula, no morphine pump, no looming machinery surrounding the bed. But he didn’t look good, either. Both his eyes were so swollen that they made one bruised lump across the sharp bridge of his nose. A long row of stitches lined his jaw, and there was enough stitchwork, still shiny with recent cleaning, on his arms to make her think of quilt patches. The hospital room, clean as it was, smelled of smoke and blood.

  Lourdes, seated beside Adelio on a visitor’s chair, rosary dangling from her fingers, looked up, and the expression on her face convinced Sylvie the woman would be adding Hail Marys for uncharitable thoughts to her postconfession routine next Thursday.

  The woman got into Sylvie’s space, pushed her back into the hallway in silent, bulldog outrage. Sylvie, conscious of the damage she’d done this family, allowed herself to lose ground before a woman twice her age and half her size.

  She throttled down the angry dark voice inside her that didn’t care for obedience or politeness or anything at all beyond its own survival, and let Lourdes tear her a new one, half in Spanish, half in English, all of it conducted with the careful, quiet fury of a woman who knew exactly how much noise would get unwelcome attention. Eventually, her words trailed off, fell apart under fear and hatred; her last sally was a broken, “You’re a bad person, Shadows. You killed my son, and now you try to kill Lio.”

  “If I were such a bad person, would I sit here and listen to you?” Sylvie said. “Let
me talk to Lio.”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “He can wake up,” Sylvie said, and stepped forward decisively. Lourdes gave ground, then, in a sudden resurgence of fury, spat at Sylvie’s feet.

  Sylvie studied the shining spot on the worn linoleum and thought it was lucky Lourdes Suarez was a good Catholic and not a bruja, or Sylvie would be fighting off a curse in the midst of Jackson Memorial’s inpatient wing. Instead, she just stepped around the sputum, marked it as a new low in her life, that a nice little Cuban housewife wanted to spit on her, and pushed her way back into Adelio’s room.

  He can wake up, she had said, and it sounded easy then. Not so easy to lean over him, searching for an unscathed place to press gentle fingers. Even washed up, he stank of smoke. His hair was burned to stubble on one side. Not so easy to wake him from blissful unconsciousness into pain. But she needed to know.

  She settled for tapping the pillow beside his face, a quick rat-a-tat of fingernails and pressure. He snorted awake, thrashed a bit, then stilled as events caught up with him. Through his puffed eye sockets, the narrow slit and shine of his eyes, she could see him remembering hospital. Remembering Sylvie.

  He angled his head on the pillow, trying to get any view of her he could. “Not a bomb,” he said. “I didn’t get hit by shrapnel. The chart is wrong.”

  “Okay,” she said. She sat down, hitched the visitor’s seat close, screeking it over the linoleum. “What was it, then?”

  “Bear.”

  It was a meaningless syllable to her at first, glossolalia brought on by painkillers, then the word clicked. “You were attacked by a bear? At a crime scene swarming with lights and cops?”

  It just didn’t make sense. There were bears in northern Florida, but not in the swampy parts of the Everglades. And even those bears were smaller, more peaceful than the western bears.

  Adelio let out a long breath, took in another, a careful marshaling of strength. “I know what I saw. I know that it is possible. You told me so yourself when you showed me the orchids that once were people. Transformation—”

  He broke off, fumbled a hand toward his stitches, suddenly panicky. Sylvie caught his hand in hers—large, chilled, shaking—and let it go once he’d calmed. Orchids. Transformation . . . After Odalys’s arrest, Sylvie had taken Suarez to the Fairchild Gardens to visit a special collection of orchids, a group of thirteen rare plants that had once been the satanic coven who’d killed his son. Suarez had been skeptical, and Sylvie had spent more time explaining the mechanics of magical transformation as she understood it than she had ever thought she would.

  “Am I going to change?”

  “Into—”

  “A bear?” Suarez’s eyes glinted, shiny with panic. Sylvie felt like she was grasping at water, something that shifted and changed and fled her understanding.

  Suarez groaned. She said, “C’mon, Lio, tell it to me from the beginning. One piece at a time. Tatya found the women, I called you, you went out to the ’Glades with a team—”

  “Nightmare,” Suarez said. His voice was gravelly with shock and lingering disorientation. “Outdoor crime scenes. A dump site for a serial killer. The Everglades. Takes forever. Just to get the bodies photographed in situ, the scene, and finally out of the water—it got dark. We set up lights, kept working. The helicopter came. Wind everywhere. But not on the water. No waves at all.”

  “Not in the lagoon?” That same stillness she and Tatya had noted.

  Suarez shifted a shoulder. “Like glass, smothered ripples. They started loading the first body—

  “Maria?” Sylvie asked.

  “No,” Lio breathed. “La rubia, the blond woman, in the swimsuit. Closest to the shore—

  “She burned, Shadows. Burned like rocket fuel. Blue and white flames, red flames, so hot, and they had her loaded. The forensic team burned . . . and then so did the bird. That’s what exploded. The helicopter. Not a bomb. The helicopter and the pilot and the forensic team.” Wetness streaked from one eye. Sylvie let him rest, but when she thought he might get lost in mourning his dead, she pushed again.

  “Magic?” Sylvie closed her eyes, tried to recall the scene she had left. Tried to remember why she had been nervous there, why she had thought Lio would be calling for her advice. She was a city girl at heart; her visits into the Everglades had been school field trips to Anhinga Trail to count animal species, and the more recent excursions to see Tatya. But even without familiarity, she had marked the lagoon as too quiet. The lagoon had had the shaky, stretched feel of a world altered by force, and the wildlife had fled before that metaphysical earthquake, leaving deadness behind. So yeah, maybe magic. But it hadn’t struck her as a spell waiting to happen. Hell, she wouldn’t have called Suarez out if that had been the case. She would have called a witch to clear the area first. Magical SWAT. Something.

  Maybe Lourdes was right. Maybe Sylvie was to blame for this.

  “Can’t tell about the fire,” Suarez murmured. “God only knows. Could have been an incendiary inside her. But I don’t think so. Not with the bear.”

  “Yeah, the bear,” Sylvie said. “I’m still not—”

  “I was in the water, thigh deep, worried that a gator was going to take me off at the knee, when the fire started. I tried to get to them, then I saw the body move before me.”

  “The burning—”

  “The other one. The one closest to me. The wildlife photographer. Your client’s wife. Maria Ruben. I thought—she was alive. I reached for her, and she changed. All claws, and teeth, and fur. Charging me. Her claws . . .”

  His hand flailed at his stitches again, and Sylvie got it this time. “The dead woman changed into a bear?” It was so hard not to sound skeptical. Even knowing about the Magicus Mundi, even knowing about shape-shifters.

  Shape-shifters didn’t play dead very well—too much animal. But they also didn’t come back from the dead.

  “Am I going to change—”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “It doesn’t work like that. Either it’s a genetic ability, or it’s a sorcerous one. It’s not a disease.”

  Given that there was death involved, Sylvie assumed sorcery. True shape-shifters were creatures at least partially bound by natural law: They lived, they bred true, they died if you killed them, and they stayed dead. Beyond that—Maria Ruben was straight-up human. Had been, at any rate.

  The wild card might be the tiny percentage of shape-shifters that were curse-related, but those were rare enough that she felt comfortable erasing them from the map of possibilities. Didn’t take too many generations of magic-users to learn that cursing your enemies to change them into beasts was more of an “oops” than a “ha!” Witches and sorcerers could make a tasty meal for a pissed-off shifter with a grudge.

  Lio was quiet, more of those silent tears streaking his cheeks. Relief, this time, she diagnosed.

  “They all changed,” he whispered finally. “Wolves and a big cat with a lashing tail.”

  “The bodies?”

  “Their eyes in the fires. Shone.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “We were dying,” Lio said. “Jorgé was screaming—haven’t heard men scream like that. Since the Gulf.”

  Sylvie caught his hand in hers again, held it tight until the shaking eased.

  “Los monstruos,” he said. His eyes closed, shields against the intolerable. Bruises on bruises. Emotional and physical. “They left us there.”

  “ ‘Left,’ ” Sylvie parroted. It was an odd choice of words. Didn’t seem to apply to a group of fleeing animals.

  “Retreated,” he said. “All the same direction.”

  No matter how she questioned Lio, she doubted she’d get much more sense out of him. His skin was grey, beaded with sweat. His throat worked, holding back sickness, pain, fear. She didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened in the ’Glades; but then, the real question was, did she need to? She’d investigated other cases with less to go on.

  “Sylvie,” Adelio said.
“Find out. The only bodies in evidence now are police. Find out what happened, and stop it.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Do you have a plan?” he pushed, unwilling to take her word.

  “Monster hunting,” Sylvie said. “I’m waiting until morning, and I’m taking magical backup.”

  Dead women who changed shape? Dead women who came back to life? Sounded like necromantic magic. Luckily, she had a new acquaintance who liked to pal around with death magic. Tierney Wales, the Opa-locka Ghoul, was going to find himself rousted bright and early for a field trip.

  SYLVIE MADE HER WAY ACROSS THE CROWDED PARKING LOT—hospitals always seemed to be doing a booming business no matter the hour—homing in on her truck and its clawed hood gleaming beneath a streetlamp. She thought of Suarez and his patchwork of sutured flesh with regret. He was going to scar as badly as her truck.

  Footsteps sounded behind her, quick-moving, and she turned, always on alert, but saw only a woman searching for her keys in a cavernous leopard-print bag. Disorganized, Sylvie thought. The woman had the common sense to move quickly through the quiet lot but not enough planning to pull her keys ahead of time. She was asking to be mugged. Especially while leaning up against a steely grey BMW.

  One of the sheep, her little dark voice suggested, dependent on a careless shepherd.

  Hush, Sylvie thought at it. Bad enough when it preached misanthropy; it made her downright nervous when it started to verge on theology. The voice was the leftover bit of Lilith’s genetic legacy carried down through generations, an all-too-active form of ancestral memory. Sylvie had killed Lilith when they met; she didn’t need to keep Lilith’s madness alive in her own blood.

  Sylvie left the hospital behind with the usual diesel cough from her truck and a belated protest from her stomach, which chose that moment to remember the abandoned enchiladas. Burned women, hospital visits, dead cops—part of being a pro meant it didn’t even faze her appetite. Not anymore. Which, considering the rate that the Magicus Mundi was invading Sylvie’s day-to-day life, was a good thing. She’d have starved otherwise.